Oktober

Oh, someone, please save me from myself. Last night we went to Teske's Germania restaurant in San Jose with friends.We had a lot of laughs swapping stories and the food was good too. Scoob had a venison ragout, one of our friends had the pork shank, while our other friend and I both had the Oktoberfest platter—five types of sausage with potato salad and sauerkraut. I remember that there was a polish sausage, a classic frankfurter, another seasoned with tarragon, but I don't remember what the other two were, though one of those was my favorite. It was pretty close to a pepperoni. Oh, yeah. And beer.

I like German food once in a blue moon, but I really can't eat much of it. It's just so heavy and rich. Even with Scoob eating from my plate, I still think I only finished half of it, though I'm paying for that half today. By hook or crook I am getting on the elliptical machine today. Twice. Hell, maybe even 3 times. And now I'm going to try to come up with something light for tonight's dinner. I have a butternut squash in the fridge, so maybe I'll do something with that.

After dinner last night we wound up at Paddy's Coffee, which was nice. Apparently they have live jazz a couple times a month at the coffeehouse, so we may need to go back to check that out. But they also had a local photographer's framed works displayed and for sale on the wall. The husband of the couple we were with calls himself an amateur photographer, but his photos are really amazing. I'd call him a professional-quality photographer who just happens to do something else from 9-to-5.

Anyhow, we were talking about how his photos were way better than what we were looking at on the wall and thinking of ways to get his stuff out there for more people to see. Heck, I only consider myself a casual hobbyist, and even I think some of my stuff was better than what was on the wall, which also got me thinking.

This past week has just been..., well, I feel like I've been chasing my tail most of the week. Remember a couple weeks ago when I said I was twitchy? Well, the design on the work website broke on Thursday this week (the developers said it was a caching issue, we've been having a lot of those lately), and on Friday the entire site crashed. It's really hard for me to make heads or tails of it since I'm not a hardcore techie.

Hell, the developers could tell me the crash happened because there was a full moon and lemmings were charging into the sea at exactly the same time a heffalump sneezed in the 100-acre Wood and I'd believe them. Well, okay, no I wouldn't, but you get the idea. Anyhow, they said the crash was triggered by our server host running an upgrade, which had and error, which in turn caused several unrelated tables in our site database to become corrupted. Yeah, I know. Gibberish.

My big question was, "What the hell were they doing running system upgrades in the middle of the day?" No systems techie I know would do that. They typically do that kind of stuff either in the evening well after 5 o'clock, or on the weekend when, if there is an error, the entire company and clients are less likely to be impacted.

So anyhow, I was spinning my wheels for a couple days either waiting for the developers to figure out what was happening, or redoing the work I'd done the day before. Good times. So by the time last night rolled around, I was soooo ready for that beer.

What else happened this past week, let's see... Oh, yeah. A colleague told me she liked how I'd been wearing my hair and had inspired her for her next haircut, while another was asking me where I'd bought an outfit. Totally blew my mind, I'm not particularly fashion-conscious, all I really care about is camouflaging the bulge around my midsection, and as far as the hair goes, my biggest goal is to keep it out of my face, not to actually style it in a particular way. So I got a taste of what it might be like to be Wayward the Fashionista this past week. Let's just say I'm much more comfortable with being Wayward the Excel Whiz and Keeper of the Company Legacy.

I wrote a blog post for the work site a couple weeks ago about Oktoberfest celebrations across the U.S. (so it seemed only fitting that we go out for our own Oktoberfest dinner last night), and that article got picked up by another travel website. So far we've seen that page get 400+ hits, which is pretty good. Most of my posts for work only see around 50–70 hits, and this blog sees about 10 on a good day. So that made me feel good; like maybe I'm onto something with my writing style and tone at work.

Oh, and I played Ms. Fix-It this week with our cooktop. One of the front burners hasn't been working for several months and I was reading my magazine (Real Simple) and came across an article about saving appliances and what types of problems you can tackle yourself, require a professional to repair, or require replacing the appliance. And lo, there was the exact problem we'd been having—the gas burner sparks, but there is no flame.

Turns out this is a simple problem to fix, requiring only a long needle to clear the clogged gas output point. Luckily, I had a nice, long hatpin in the sewing basket mom put together for me that did just the trick. This burner has been frustrating Scoob for months, and it was sweet to be able to tell him that I, the Amazing Wayward, had fixed it in a matter of seconds.

Scoob wanted to know what I'd done, but I donned my black cape with red satin lining and pulled a rabbit, or a reasonable facsimile thereof (Dozer), from my top hat and said, "A magician never reveals her secrets." It was pretty cool. Fixing it myself instead of calling a professional essentially paid for the magazine subscription and then some.